Unleashing the creative potential of your team. Stop playing the boss.

How can we best utilize our team's potential and creative capital to maximize their input and create more well-rounded and effective business solutions?

Teams are made of people.

People are humans like you and me.

Humans need a safe space to express themselves and their potential.

If they are encouraged to express their potential then the team's potential will grow and the business will do better.

What does safe space mean?

It means feeling safe to express whatever crazy idea you have without the fear that you will be criticized, ridiculed or punished.

How many team leaders and business owners provide that kind of safe space?

Not so many is my guess.

So what should we actually do?

How can we start unleashing the creative powers of our teams?

Active listening can add to our situational awareness and help us form more targeted questions in order to reveal the hidden pieces of the puzzle.

Listen to each member of the team. Understand their filter of reality.

Do not listen to judge or to respond.

Listen to understand their point and also the source of their point of view.

If you understand their source then you understand how they prefer to look at things.

Then you will understand how they are motivated to learn.

Humans have different experiences and different filters of perception of those experiences.

It is good to have diverse filters of perceptions within our team. We do not want more people like us. We need diversity of experience and cognition. And then we want those humans to feel safe to express those different perceptions of reality.

So how do we communicate with our teams to achieve that?

Once we feel we gathered enough information from them to build the bigger picture of an issue then we can talk to them.

Active listening is crucial though and must precede.

If you want to talk - after listening -then frame the issue in ways to raise the awareness of the team and brainstorm to solve problems at their root.

Do not talk as an authority with power, talk as a human being that is curious to learn from their team.

If we do not create the conditions to allow freedom of expression and psychological safety we will miss critical information and whatever solutions are created will only touch the surface of the problems.

Go deeper by listening to understand not to respond.

Allow people to say the wrong things and make mistakes.

Ask questions.

Lots of them.

Be curious and humble.

If you want to play the boss you can be actor in a gangster movie or theatre after work.